Tuesday, June 16, 2009

This is going to be a short post because, well, there's not much to say. This comic doesn't offend me or enrage me, but sure as fuck doesn't amuse me or make me laugh. I think the joke it just kind of dumb. I agree with the people who say it seems like a joke you'd find on bash.org, but I don't think that should detract from it - bash.org is funny, so emulating it can be funny as well. The difference is the humor there comes from the fact that they print real conversations (or at least ostensibly real ones - all I know is I sent them a fake one and they never printed it) where Randall makes up stuff and when you are making up stuff, a funny quip or humorous event needs to be a lot funnier than in real life.

Here, try it at home: Imagine something really funny that someone once improvised. This could be like at an improv comedy show or just in real life, something clever someone came up with on the spot. Now go tell the joke to someone else, and see what they think. Probably they will not think it was nearly as good as you did when you first heard it. There's something about knowing it was improvised, knowing it was in some way real, that adds a lot. And that's why today's comic fails to amuse me. TRY AGAIN.

Something Nice To Say: He took the time to draw stuff today! that is nice. Though do you see how the chair is twice as tall in panel 2 as it is in panel 3?

I mentioned this on the couldbebetter post, but frame two of the new comic looks like it has a streaming flash-video in it. I'm pretty sure embedded flash video didn't become widely available until the youtube era started in 2005 (way after the 14.4k days).

Even if we're assuming he had dialup until last week, when given the option, who the hell would *stream* porn over dialup? You always just set a bunch of downloads and go to sleep. Everyone knows that. Thus the porn *collection* that we had to archive on our hard drives and hide from parents and siblings. Jeez. Sometimes I feel like Randall was born yesterday.

Hunter Barry: God, it used to be that he could. I don't know what the hell his deal is. But I really want to know. This isn't a fluke. And as much as I hate to admit it, I really doubt this is Randy just discovering sex. Maybe he's just discovering casual sex, but even then, it seems unlikely.

Maybe he read something that talks about sex a lot, and decided "That sounds fun, I'll take six." I mean, it isn't entirely implausible. But usually when you do that, it's not because you think "man, I need more SEX JOKES." Usually it's like "man, these are so raw/honest/human/whatever, I want to do that too."

So it's a weird thing if you read one of those and it's like "man, sex jokes. GOTTA HAVE THE LIVING FUCK OUT OF THEM."

Please, just call me Hunter. The kicker is I was one of the late converts to XKCD, picking it up in March. And, within three months, he's utterly lost the creative spark he had in his earlier works. I think the problem is success got to his head, so rather than talk about things that are commonplace in a unique way (like funny way of walking on colored tiles or the fear of Jurassic Park velociraptors), he only talks about obscure things he likes (like Firefly and Linux and incredibly open depictions of sex).

On an unrelated note, which do you find more offensive: the attempted portrayal of graphic sex in stick figure form or the frequency with which it occurs?

Hunter, I would say the graphic sex in general is creepy- but it seems like Randy thinks he can get away with it because they're stick figures. Truth is, graphic sex is graphic sex. And furthermore, why is it so often cunnilingus?

@Cuddlefish: Meh. I just Googled "python tutorial" to see if I could find basic commands, and then tried to remember which ones xkcd mentioned. Then I used >>> and semicolons because they look program-y.

598's redeeming qualities are variety in the drawings, and a halfway decent joke. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt since it's likely that he came up with that without seeing the SMBC one, but it doesn't speak for him that yet again, he's doing a joke that another webcomic did a few days earlier, like the Papyrus one.

The reason it's always cunnilingus, by the way, is because Randall wants to make it obvious to the ladies that he's there to service -them-.

Malethoth, you made me vomit into my mouth a bit. Mission accomplished?

Well, I've personally never read any self-aggrandising motives into Randy's depictions of cunnilingus. Maybe it was because I was too busy graoning I read the first panel. I'm tired of Randy's obsession with sex lately. No, I'm tired of how horrible the sex jokes are. If they were remotely fresh, original or funny it would be worthwhile reading. No, we get stick figure Randy going 'I have a bizarre fetish and I asked my gf to go along with it, hurr hurr'. Also, adding the internet into jokes doesn't not automatically = funny. Puh-lease.

As for the art, the stick figures in 598 were very weird looking, what with the respective women in what were presumably the video and a banner ad both had their arms sticking up in the air. Like they were in a 'yay!' kind of position.

Sorry I made this into a comment on 598 instead of 597 but the latter was so boring it's not even worth commenting on, if I could find something to comment on about it, anyway.

598 would be great if there hadn't been so many sexual comics lately, but there's just so much oversaturation of dirty, unfunny stuff lately on xkcd that it's hard to appreciate a good one with a dirty joke.

Also, FWIW, I don't find FML amazing like everyone else seems to because I have the sneaking suspicioun that most to all of them are fake. The idea that these are real things that happen to real people is what makes them good. The reality that most of them are made up makes me not enjoy it at all.

That is what Carl is getting at. This comic, being basically a bash log, holds to the rules of bash logs. Namely, they're supposed to be funny because they are actual conversations. It's not really funny that imaginary stick person can't control themselves, but it might be funny if this was a log of actual events.

So I don't really see how it's an inane or pointless criticism of this particular comic. You can disagree with it, but that doesn't make it an unfair point.

Fernie's bullshit excuse sounds like just another variation of the No True Scotsman argument.

You don't think xkcd is funny? Then you're probably not its target audience; nerds! Oh wait, you say you're a nerd? We'll you're not a real nerd.

Because as we all know, Randall Patrick Munroe the First is the infallible God-Emperor of Nerdkind. The God-Emperor is flawless, and thus incapable of making bad jokes.

The fool hath said in his heart, xkcd is unfunny. If a person is found saying xkcd is unfunny, as he would say CAD is unfunny, it is an abomination upon him. He shall surely be put to death; his blood shall be upon him. Amen.

Randcarl, could you stop doing the "i'm going to say one nice thing" if you're just going to use it to be passive aggressive? Just go "i hate b", not "i like a, although it reminds me of b, which i hate". That's not what we're paying you for.

I actually liked the 597 comic....except for the ridiculous fucking wording at the beginning...god what kind of douche bag says shit like that. Constant novelty saps my initiative. Shut the fuck up and write a god damn comic please. UGH.

599 - This is really obscure. There's a sort of math thing called the "Erdos number," which refers to how many degrees of separation you are from a really prolific mathematician, Paul Erdos. The guys are reducing their Erdos numbers.

Alt-text confirms by linking it to the more common Kevin Bacon game.

CONS: Too many panels for a non-joke that's just an incredibly obscure reference. That beret guy returns. The math in the fifth panel is completely irrelevant. It used to be that Randall prided himself on including correct math, right? Like, 54 is an actual physics equation and graph. 599 is just random math-y symbols.

Also, 599 is the same joke as 567 and 102, re: Nerds take advantage of something really incredible and significant to do something idiosyncratic and nerdy and haha! At least this one switched up the formula a bit by using the apocalypse instead of time travel, although it would've been reformulated really easily into a joke about mathematicians travelling back in time to work with Erdos instead of stopping the Spanish Inquisition.

It's the sort of math thing that you'd never really learn just taking courses in high school or even pre-reqs for something in college, the way you might learn some of the other stuff. You pretty much have to be a math major, and a math major who spends a lot of time shooting the breeze with faculty.

In which case it wouldn't really count for the Erdos number at all, would it? I mean, the Erdos number is based on collaborative publications that link you to Erdos, not random scribblings that he signed.

I was vaguely aware of what the Erdos number was referring to, but for the reason Malethoth K mentions I didn't get it.

Wikipedia has "It is jokingly said that Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron has an Erdős number of 1 because they both autographed the same baseball when Emory University awarded them honorary degrees on the same day."

So I have to know the reference AND have to know some trite wikipedia trivia?

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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